Thinking of trying Touhou

[Kosheh]

hey i can give a little Touhou Insight from a casual point of view

the cool thing about touhou are how straight-up insane its community is (they're almost like bronies, kinda, but in this case it's for the best, trust me. bronies usually don't code games)

there's the main games, which are "bullet hell" shooters. basically, they're shoot-em-ups where you're a little spaceship but the bosses spew INSANE amounts of damaging pellets.
they're awesome, because one man who goes by ZUN created the entire game from the ground up; from the pixelart, to the character design, to the game code, to the game mechanics (which include a 'card deck' element per character) to the music. It's all him. he's almost prophetic. he's created more of these than i can count on my hands.


then there's the .5 games, which are fighting game spinoffs. ZUN supervises these games but they're made by another studio. they play like a weird dragonball 2d fighting game but if every fighter was cute. it also uses a card system akin to the main series for special buffs and character supers, too. they're pretty intense, and very good. i'd recommend them if you like smash bros. more than street fighter, weirdly enough.
they recently made a new touhou fighter that pretty much reboots the fighting games' mechanics, character art, everything, and further emphasises dragonball-esque battles (ALL FIGHTS take place in the air)

and then there's the several spinoff games made by fans of the series (yes - fangames of an indie game), including [but definitely not limited to] Kumajou Densetsu (a Castlevania parody that's ACTUALLY AMAZING), New Super Marisa World (an SMW parody), and a 3D polygonal touhou airborne fighting game.



there's also several remix albums of the main games' soundtrack (oh, yeah - which all of the spinoffs and fangame-of-indiegame make use of, too)


the series is pretty legit; but i'm sure someone else here has a little better insight on the series here than i do.